Rating: 
Summary: A cool farewell to illusion
Review: I first became aware of Goodbye to All That when I was reading Resurrection by Pat Barker. Barker's WWI historical novel has Robert Grave, Seigfried Sassoon, WHR Rivers, and Wilfred Owens as characters in a British army hospital. Graves is a minor character, but Sassoon and Rivers are the main characters. My curiosity about Robert Grave's impressions of his WWI experiences lead me to Goodbye to All That.
By the time Graves had written this book, he was 35 and was living with Laura Riding, his literary muse and lover. Yet he does not mention her in the book. Rather he concentrates on the disasterous British school system that he endured as a child and young man, his expereinces in WWI, and ends with the downfall of his first marriage to Nancy Nicholson (the mother of his 4 children) and his teaching position in Egypt at the University of Cairo. Nancy was a socialist and feminist and eventually she drove Graves away. This is so odd considering that Graves was totally sympathetic to matriarchial power structures and devoted much of his writing nad poetry to the White Goddess. There is no White Goddess to be found in these pages however, which is so odd considering his fascination with this topic throughout his poetic and literary career. T.E. Lawrence was a friend of Graves and gave Graves the copywrite to four chapters of Pillars of Wisdom for publication in the USA. This allowed Graves additional income to support his writing career as well as a large family.
The sections on WWI are the highlights of the book. Robert Graves enlisted at age 19 and became an officer due to his social class. He is seriously wounded and his family is told he is dead but he rises from this condition to regain his health. He meets the poet Siefried Sassoon during this convalescence. He also meets Dr. WHR Rivers, the famous neurologist, psychologist,and anthropologist. Rivers introduces Graves to the concepts of the relationships between dreams, myths, poems, and creative imagination, an area of interst for Graves all his life. In the passages on WWI, Graves cooly relates a world wide nightmare and catastrophy. His cool wit and irony distance the reader somewhat from the horror and terror. He describes mutilated bodies with a dry factual style. This cool matter of fact chronological presentation is damning in the extreme of the European leadership that lead the world into this bloody stalemate.
For a hot blooded version of WWI I would recommend Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got his Gun in addition to Grave's cool and analytical matter-of-fact tone. I would also recommend Tuchman's Guns of August for a chronoloical explanation of the war. I would also recommend Pat Barker's WWI trilogy: Resurrection, Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road.
Grave's factual clear headed narrative reveals the illogical disaster of WWI that killed one in three of Grave's school mates. Graves relates how upper class officers brought servants to war yet as the war progresses a whole generation of males, both the working class and the aristocracy of England, are killed. WWI shattered the class system of the 18th century and cleared the ground for the modern era.
What is Graves saying "goodbye" to? He is saying goodbye to his youth, his first marriage to an early feminist, to old Europe and its rigid class structure, but most of all to illusion.
Rating: 
Summary: An amazingly lyrical and candid war memoir.
Review: I found this book to be one of the most haunting accounts of war I have ever read. I appreciated it all the more after I'd finished reading Siefried Sassoon's semi-fictional account of his time on the Western Front. Not that Sassoon's book isn't excellent in its own way, it's just that Graves' book seemed to resonate with me on many levels, and left a lasting impression. If I was to advise anyone on which to read, I would tell them to read both, but read Graves first... A truly excellent portrayal of the frustraions and horrors of war.
Rating:
Summary: Moving report on the end of an era
Review: I spotted this remarkable book on ... Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of the Century list. In "Good-bye to All That, " the British poet Robert Graves (1895-1985), best known to American readers as the author of the novel of ancient Rome, "I Claudius," writes the autobiography of his youth, justifiably famous for its eloquent but straight-forward depiction of the horrors of WWI, during which Graves spent years in the trenches of France as an army captain.More than the war, however, Graves' topic is the passing of an era: the class-ridden and naïve culture of the Edwardian upper classes, a culture did not survive the war. Graves came from a landed family and received a classic boarding-school education. Even in the trenches officers like Graves had personal servants and took offense when they had to dine with officers of `the wrong sort' (promoted from the lower classes). Graves' narrative itself barely survives the end of the war; the post-war chapters seem listless and shell-shocked, emotionally detached. The battles he survived are written about with precision, gravity, and emotional impact; but Graves' marriage and the birth of his children seem like newspaper reports. Surprisingly, he doesn't even talk of his poetry much. This, surely, is not a defect of the book but a genuine reflection of his feelings at the time: After the War, nothing meant much to him. Graves' literary style is very matter-of-fact--the opposite of the imagistic, adjective-driven language one might expect of a poet. Instead, he had a gift for the right details: in only a sentence or two, by careful description, he can perfectly describe a fellow-soldier or give the exact sense of `being there' in battle. The book is a remarkable achievement worth reading even for those who may be glad the old days were left behind.
Rating:
Summary: Moving report on the end of an era
Review: I spotted this remarkable book on ... Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of the Century list. In "Good-bye to All That, " the British poet Robert Graves (1895-1985), best known to American readers as the author of the novel of ancient Rome, "I Claudius," writes the autobiography of his youth, justifiably famous for its eloquent but straight-forward depiction of the horrors of WWI, during which Graves spent years in the trenches of France as an army captain. More than the war, however, Graves' topic is the passing of an era: the class-ridden and naïve culture of the Edwardian upper classes, a culture did not survive the war. Graves came from a landed family and received a classic boarding-school education. Even in the trenches officers like Graves had personal servants and took offense when they had to dine with officers of 'the wrong sort' (promoted from the lower classes). Graves' narrative itself barely survives the end of the war; the post-war chapters seem listless and shell-shocked, emotionally detached. The battles he survived are written about with precision, gravity, and emotional impact; but Graves' marriage and the birth of his children seem like newspaper reports. Surprisingly, he doesn't even talk of his poetry much. This, surely, is not a defect of the book but a genuine reflection of his feelings at the time: After the War, nothing meant much to him. Graves' literary style is very matter-of-fact--the opposite of the imagistic, adjective-driven language one might expect of a poet. Instead, he had a gift for the right details: in only a sentence or two, by careful description, he can perfectly describe a fellow-soldier or give the exact sense of 'being there' in battle. The book is a remarkable achievement worth reading even for those who may be glad the old days were left behind.
Rating:
Summary: A great book
Review: It is one of the regrets of my life that I had not read this book until I was nearly 50-years-old. This is the extremely entertaining and amusing autobiography of the young Robert Graves, founder of the Royal Albert Society. Incidentally, Graves served in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, not the "Royal Welsh" - it is inconceivable that anyone who has actually read this book would not know this, as it is a major theme of the work.
Rating:
Summary: Autobiography at it's best!
Review: Life through the eyes of Robert Graves: just before, during, and after World War I. The most compelling
autobiography I have ever read. This chronicles most
importantly the time Graves spent in the Royal Welsh
Fusiliers and is a portrait of WWI that will be different
than anything else ever read. Recommended to me by my
history Professor, this has been out of print in hardcopy
for nearly 30 years. Here is a full life, and one that
everyone can share.
Rating:
Summary: A very well-written account. . .
Review: of a man's dissolusionment.
It is interesting that Graves' contemporary J.R.R. Tolkein had similar experiences in WW-I, but his reaction to them was so very different. Graves lost his faith, while Tolkein held fast to it, for one thing.
Rating: 
Summary: A Mixed Blessing of History
Review: Robert Graves is one of the greatest poets of the early 20th century. But this book is not for poetry lovers. It starts with a rather boring story of his early life including his affair with a fellow student in a British boarding school. The book does pick up significantly on the frank telling of the life of a average British Officer in the trenches of World War One. The experience of the trenches is one that speaks of great human waste and despair. He does a good job of talking about the conditions and the quickness of death. Too often the Great War is remembered with some sort of nostagia--it wasn't romantic. Robert Graves' book helps to shed light on a time that too few were left to write the history.
Rating:
Summary: A Warrior for Class Privelige
Review: Robert Graves volunteers for WW1 even though he is only one of six from over a hundred that was against compulsory military service. During the war we learn of his disdain for staff officers, the rear echelon, and cowardly ministers at the same time he is admiring concientious objectors. He becomes expert at platoon and company size maneuvers in the field and the describes the horrors of war as well as any. During leave he longs to go back to the trenches because he seems to think the people at home just do not appreciate the sacrifices made at the front. He seems to relate to the common man and after the war registers himself as a socialist. All this at the same time that he has servants, expects to always have them, calls himself a member of the governing class, and wants to maintain even the privelige of an officer brothel over an enlisted man's brothel. A curious autobiography of contradictions that only a surviving British Officer could have written.
Rating:
Summary: Brutally honest war memoir
Review: Robert Graves, poet and author of "I, Claudius", was also an infantry officer in the Great War. Here he has written a war memoir which ranks in the same league as Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia". Honest and open to a fault, he chronicles his upbringing in the English public schools system and his dislike of hypocrisy. This antagonism he will carry with him throughout his period in the trenches. Graves' vivid portrayal of life in the trenches is second to none. He recounts the endless routine of trench life with its boredom and the terror of attack and German shelling. Held up to special scorn is the sheer stupidity of the higher command and its insistence on wasting the lives of officers and men. Graves successful attempt at convincing a military board to go easy on his friend and writer Siegfried Sassoon is an amazing segment in itself (Sassoon wrote a pacifist tract while at the same time leading his infantry company with- by all accounts- great courage). His description of the effects of life in the trenches is well written. Neurosthania (shell-shock) was the 19th century term before post-traumatic disorder was coined. The portrayal of it is vivid, not in a clinical way, but in the way Graves writes about himself and his comrades as they adjust to civilian life. Everything before Graves life seems a prologue to the war, and everything after an epilogue. What an great and important book this is.
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